Series: Night Angel
Publisher: Orbit, 2008
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Swords & sorcery
Rating: 3 1/2 pint of blood
I actually like the cover art quite a bit. It's simple, eye-catching, and tells you exactly what you need to know about the book. The stark white of the background is a great contrast to our "50 shades of black" assassin dude, and the purple swirls add just a touch of stylization. Also, awesome foreshortening pose. I'm already in!
So some time ago, a friend of mine read the trilogy this book starts, and told me I had to read it as soon as possible. To speed this, she actually sent me all three of the Night Angel books. They'd been on my radar before that, because as I think I've mentioned before, I'm rather fond of stories involving assassins, but since I hadn't heard much about the Night Angel books specifically to make them stand out in my mind from other fantasy fare, other novels kept taking priority. Until now.
Ok, bear with me here, because the plot is a twisty one, so my plot summary might get a little convoluted. We're gonna try this anyway, though.
Street rat Azoth has always struggled just to resist. He's sworn that one day he'll be just like Durzo Blint, the best assassin in the city and a man who never has reason to be afraid or hungry. Of course, everyone knows Durzo doesn't take apprentices, but Azoth is determined to be the exception to that rule, and strikes a deal with the assassin. Of course, that deal will change everything for Azoth, and once he's become Durzo's apprentice, he'll have to cut all ties to everyone he knows and loves, take on a new identity, and learn to live without any emotional connections.
Meanwhile, political machinations are grinding, alliances being made, and power is shifting. When a coup that's been years in the planning starts falling into place, it could be down to Azoth to turn the tides if he doesn't want all of Cenaria doomed to cower beneath a power-hungry sadist, but he'll have to make some difficult decisions first. Either way, it'll require sacrifice.
Generic sounding? A bit, and I have to admit a lot of the world building is pretty standard epic fantasy fare. The Way of Shadows is very plot-driven, and has multiple story arcs that intersect to keep things busy. So while I can't say I ever really got a good feel for the world these characters live in, there was always something going on, whether it was politics or assassinations or just a focus on Azoth's struggles to balance his natural inclinations with his master's expectations.
I really did like what Weeks did with Azoth's gradual transformation from street rat into assassin, and the relationship between him and Durzo was very strong. In fact, if the book had just been about that without any of the politics and plot twists, I would have been a happy reader. They're both complex characters who demonstrate a capacity for change (in spite of their stubbornness), and most of my favourite parts involved the two of them doing their thing. It's only one aspect of the novel, though, and while a major one, it sometimes gets buried in all the other plotlines and characters.
Which brings us to my biggest complaint. There are a lot of characters running around, each doing their own thing, and while that can work sometimes, it didn't always work for me here, particularly in the first half of the book. In the earlier parts, I spent a lot of time just trying (and not always succeeding) to keep the various characters straight. There would be a few chapters following Azoth, and then both the point of view and location would switch over to someone else, with their own personal conflict. Sometimes the difference was so vast I felt like I'd accidentally started in on a different book, and it took awhile for some of these characters and their plotlines to feel like they were a part of a larger cohesive story. Some of them never really did. I enjoy a big, sprawling, complex novel as much as the next fantasy nerd, but when I'm constantly having to stop and look back to try and remember who this guy is and why he's doing that thing he's doing, it's very distracting.
Once I got the hang of who was who, though, there's a lot of fun to be had in the way the plot twists this way and that. I predicted about half of the twists, but I was surprised as often as not, and the framework was always set solidly in place for every new revelation.
Weeks has some fun exploring the idea of morality in a pair of protagonists who don't really fit in with the good guys or the bad guys. Both Durzo and Azoth struggle with their ideas of morality in their own ways, and there's some really interesting reading in that. With a few exceptions, though, most of the other characters seem to be all good or all bad, and while it's interesting to see the assassins contrasted in that way with the others, I would have liked to see more of the "gray morality." I do suspect, though, that Weeks is building that up for at least a few of them in the other two volumes in the trilogy.
The Way of Shadows is available in mass market paperback
.
Publisher: Orbit, 2008
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Swords & sorcery
Rating: 3 1/2 pint of blood
I actually like the cover art quite a bit. It's simple, eye-catching, and tells you exactly what you need to know about the book. The stark white of the background is a great contrast to our "50 shades of black" assassin dude, and the purple swirls add just a touch of stylization. Also, awesome foreshortening pose. I'm already in!
So some time ago, a friend of mine read the trilogy this book starts, and told me I had to read it as soon as possible. To speed this, she actually sent me all three of the Night Angel books. They'd been on my radar before that, because as I think I've mentioned before, I'm rather fond of stories involving assassins, but since I hadn't heard much about the Night Angel books specifically to make them stand out in my mind from other fantasy fare, other novels kept taking priority. Until now.
Ok, bear with me here, because the plot is a twisty one, so my plot summary might get a little convoluted. We're gonna try this anyway, though.
Street rat Azoth has always struggled just to resist. He's sworn that one day he'll be just like Durzo Blint, the best assassin in the city and a man who never has reason to be afraid or hungry. Of course, everyone knows Durzo doesn't take apprentices, but Azoth is determined to be the exception to that rule, and strikes a deal with the assassin. Of course, that deal will change everything for Azoth, and once he's become Durzo's apprentice, he'll have to cut all ties to everyone he knows and loves, take on a new identity, and learn to live without any emotional connections.
Meanwhile, political machinations are grinding, alliances being made, and power is shifting. When a coup that's been years in the planning starts falling into place, it could be down to Azoth to turn the tides if he doesn't want all of Cenaria doomed to cower beneath a power-hungry sadist, but he'll have to make some difficult decisions first. Either way, it'll require sacrifice.
Generic sounding? A bit, and I have to admit a lot of the world building is pretty standard epic fantasy fare. The Way of Shadows is very plot-driven, and has multiple story arcs that intersect to keep things busy. So while I can't say I ever really got a good feel for the world these characters live in, there was always something going on, whether it was politics or assassinations or just a focus on Azoth's struggles to balance his natural inclinations with his master's expectations.
I really did like what Weeks did with Azoth's gradual transformation from street rat into assassin, and the relationship between him and Durzo was very strong. In fact, if the book had just been about that without any of the politics and plot twists, I would have been a happy reader. They're both complex characters who demonstrate a capacity for change (in spite of their stubbornness), and most of my favourite parts involved the two of them doing their thing. It's only one aspect of the novel, though, and while a major one, it sometimes gets buried in all the other plotlines and characters.
Which brings us to my biggest complaint. There are a lot of characters running around, each doing their own thing, and while that can work sometimes, it didn't always work for me here, particularly in the first half of the book. In the earlier parts, I spent a lot of time just trying (and not always succeeding) to keep the various characters straight. There would be a few chapters following Azoth, and then both the point of view and location would switch over to someone else, with their own personal conflict. Sometimes the difference was so vast I felt like I'd accidentally started in on a different book, and it took awhile for some of these characters and their plotlines to feel like they were a part of a larger cohesive story. Some of them never really did. I enjoy a big, sprawling, complex novel as much as the next fantasy nerd, but when I'm constantly having to stop and look back to try and remember who this guy is and why he's doing that thing he's doing, it's very distracting.
Once I got the hang of who was who, though, there's a lot of fun to be had in the way the plot twists this way and that. I predicted about half of the twists, but I was surprised as often as not, and the framework was always set solidly in place for every new revelation.
Weeks has some fun exploring the idea of morality in a pair of protagonists who don't really fit in with the good guys or the bad guys. Both Durzo and Azoth struggle with their ideas of morality in their own ways, and there's some really interesting reading in that. With a few exceptions, though, most of the other characters seem to be all good or all bad, and while it's interesting to see the assassins contrasted in that way with the others, I would have liked to see more of the "gray morality." I do suspect, though, that Weeks is building that up for at least a few of them in the other two volumes in the trilogy.
The Way of Shadows is available in mass market paperback
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